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Let States Fix Immigration

Last week, Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron
Johnson (R-Wis.) introduced a new bill that would allow states to
sponsor foreign workers to live and work in their states. The idea
is a brand new one for the United States, but it has merit.

The federal government has had a total monopoly over legal
immigration for years, and the consequence has been substantial
illegal immigration and massive wait times for high-skilled foreign
workers. America should try something new.

The United States has a relatively restrictive immigration system
for economic immigrants-far below the per-capita
rate of immigration in many other developed countries. This
bill would allow America to compete for foreign workers in the same
way other countries already do. As
my new Cato Institute analysis of the bill notes, the
legislation’s 500,000 visas would increase the annual flow of
foreign workers to the United States by about 80 percent.

In this context, it makes sense to increase legal immigration,
but why should the increase come from state-sponsorship? One reason
is that markets need to adjust quickly to changes in order to
fulfill the needs of consumers. Yet the federal immigration
monopoly has simply demonstrated itself to be so inflexible to
changing conditions that, despite widespread agreement that it
needs changes, none are made.

Congress has left the system unreformed since 1990. In that
time, total employment doubled; agricultural employment fell in
half; manufacturing ended its reign as the leading employer in most
states; the service sector took its place; and unauthorized
immigrants moved from seasonal industries to year-round employment.
Despite all of these shifts, Congress has done nothing.

State-sponsored visas
would allow legislators with disagreements over these issues to
agree to disagree and fix the system without total
consensus.

In a way, it’s understandable why. Congress has an impossible
job. It is trying to design an immigration system that fits the
needs of Silicon Valley, the Great Plains, and the Rust Belt. Some
states have economic growth several times the national average.
Growth in other states is negative. It’s just not possible to have
a one-size-fits-all approach in a country as diverse as the United
States.

If states had greater control, the system would naturally adjust
at the state-level without a need for national consensus. Under the
current system, reforms only happen after small, local problems
build into a big, national one, and even then, Congress often fails
to act.

One reason that proponents of reform have yet to break through
is that a national reform requires a national consensus on the
problems and the solutions. But the problems are different in
Alaska or Louisiana than they are in Michigan or Texas.
State-sponsored visas would allow legislators with disagreements
over these issues to agree to disagree and fix the system without
total consensus.

State-sponsored visas also accord with both America’s tradition
of federalism and the Constitution. The Supreme Court
has held that states are limited only insofar as the federal
government chooses to limit them. Moreover, under the proposal,
states would simply be “sponsoring” workers, not
admitting them into the country. States already sponsor workers for
federal visas in their capacity as employers or students in their
capacity as universities. Procedurally, this would be no
different.

This bill poses no new enforcement challenges either. Guest
workers under the current system are already required to work for a
single employer, which is a much more difficult challenge than
simply allowing them to live in a single state. Yet the overstay
rate for the current guest workers is less than three percent because the ability to come again
legally is such a powerful incentive to follow the rules. This bill
would build in the same incentive, allowing renewals only to
workers who followed the rules.

Regional visas have already been successfully implemented in two
other geographically diverse, former-British colonies-Australia and
Canada. Both countries have programs that let provinces or states
sponsor workers directly. Local control has helped this system keep
political support, and the number of regional visas has more than
doubled in both countries since the early 2000s.

The United States needs to reform the legal immigration system,
but finding agreement is difficult. A new approach that distributes
power more locally could be just the thing to change the
debate.